There’s only one form of accounting shadier than Hollywood math, and that’s Washington math. The deficit is one of the most fertile fields for financial finagling, for instance, when Biden claimed he cut the deficit by a trillion dollars when all that actually happened was that we didn’t spend an extra trillion on pandemic relief that year because the pandemic was over the year before.

For those of you who enjoy shady math, here’s an example of how the government is hiding our ballooning federal deficit that Biden claims his policies are reducing. Like claiming that this year’s deficit is $400 million lower by subtracting the $400 million that the Supreme Court wouldn’t let Biden spend on paying off his constituents’ student loans.

https://www.westernjournal.com/fact-check-federal-budget-deficit-double-just-one-year-biden/

Only in Washington can money you wanted to spend but were never going to be allowed to spend be counted as a “budget cut.” I think I’ll tell my wife that I’ve decided to cut our expenses by $50,000 by not buying a fancy new fishing boat this year and see how that goes over.

Aside from DC’s mathemagician act, that article also contains some actual math that should scare anyone who cares about America’s fiscal health. Not only are deficits out of sight, each one adds to our national debt, which recently topped $33 trillion. In a vicious circle of fiscal incompetence, high inflation is forcing higher spending (like last year’s 8.7% COLA for Social Security recipients) while higher interest rates to curb inflation are raising the interest payments on the national debt. Interest payments on the debt will soon be more than we spend on national defense.

The government has run up a debt on our national credit card that averages out to about $100,000 for each and every American. And nobody asked me if I wanted any of that spending. Personally, I’d rather have two new $50,000 fishing boats.